


Marigold and Rosemary

by AlibiNonsense



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Angst, Childhood, Gen, Get ready to cry, Heavy Angst, Kathryn constantly trying and failing to understand her son, Normal Life, Parenthood, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-17
Updated: 2018-09-17
Packaged: 2019-07-13 17:51:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16022951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlibiNonsense/pseuds/AlibiNonsense
Summary: Phil’s a strange child. His first word is ‘why’. He doesn’t speak much and cries a lot and never smiles. His parents take him to doctor after doctor who say that, despite that he’s intelligent for his age, there’s nothing wrong with him. Nigel gives his son fat plastic toy soldiers to wave about in his chubby hands and put into his mouth. Instead, Phil makes a stage out of a baby blanket and has two of the little men carefully hop around it; lines up the rest in rows as an audience and then knocks them over when he’s finished, his face crumpling.





	Marigold and Rosemary

**Author's Note:**

> I don't actually know these people in real life and this is fictional. I don't normally put this, but, with RPF, it's better safe than sorry.

            Phil’s a strange child. His first word is ‘why’. He doesn’t speak much and cries a lot and never smiles. His parents take him to doctor after doctor who say that, despite that he’s intelligent for his age, there’s nothing wrong with him. Nigel gives his son fat plastic toy soldiers to wave about in his chubby hands and put into his mouth. Instead, Phil makes a stage out of a baby blanket and has two of the little men carefully hop around it; lines up the rest in rows as an audience and then knocks them over when he’s finished, his face crumpling. Kathryn gives their child a boat with a flag on the top of it to play with in the bath. Instead, Phil puts two of the little toy men into it and acts out quiet little scenes in it on land that neither of his parents are allowed to watch. He never argues with Martyn. He isn’t a jealous baby. He eats everything he’s given without protest, mechanically chewing like each carrot stick and cube of cheese are chores to get through, and he cries at night.

            When he has his nappy changed, he lies on the changing mat in stony silence and stares at the ceiling. When he catches something off Martyn, he lies in bed and whimpering pitifully and avoids looking at the plastic bear in his cot (like he always does). When it’s his birthday, he sits at the side on Kathryn’s lap and doesn’t look at anybody. He never cries _for_ things; not like Martyn, who is as much a normal three-year-old as it is possible to be. Martyn stumbles over the words of picture books and runs around barefoot in the garden, giggling when his father lets him play with the hose. Martyn tickles Phil (who squeaks and then starts panicking and wailing and trying to escape his brother’s fingers), and tries to make Phil play battles with him in the bath (the most Phil does is half-heartedly drag one boat back and forth through the water whilst Martyn splashes and crashes things into each other and gets manic fits of the giggles). Martyn is normal and Phil is not.

            Phil’s second word is ‘no’ – desperate and forceful, when Nigel tries to take away two of the little plastic men and put his son to bed. It shocks him enough that he doesn’t take them, in the end, even though he was only going to put them back with the other toys. Phil sleeps with the plastic figures after that and doesn’t let them out of his sight. His third word is ‘sorry’; pronunciation without any sort of lisp, after Kathryn has had to come in and soothe him down from a panic at two o’clock in the morning when both of them are meant to be sleeping. It tugs at her heart a little bit that her one-year-old feels his comfort isn’t her priority; that he is a burden to her in this, and she wonders how he’s even managed to have thoughts like that at an age when most children are only just learning to say sorry at all.

            They take him to child psychiatrists who say that he’s normal, if uncommunicative, and who don’t believe them when they say he has panic attacks. They ask friends and relatives: no, they’ve never heard of anything similar happening, but it’s probably just Phil being Phil. When the grandparents visit, Martyn gets excited and runs around showing them things and doing silly routines for them, whilst Phil sits on Kathryn’s lap and doesn’t look at anyone… or crawls into a corner and starts playing with his two little toy soldiers again. One day, when Kathryn’s mother picks him up to draw black whiskers on his face like she’s already drawn on Martyn (who is running about pretending to be a cat), Phil doesn’t let her: he just starts crying again. Hard, whimpery sobs that make people worry that he’s ill or in pain; that aren’t because he wants to eat or sleep or have his nappy changed; that scare people in their desperate intensity like Phil always scares people.

            He turns two with little fanfare because no-one wants their offspring to come to the party. Kathryn tries to make it a happy event, but Phil doesn’t even try to blow out his candle: he just cries and cries. Martyn snatches the cupcake from him, in the end, and blows it out with a forceful spray of air and spit, and then eats it, because even if Phil’s not the jealous type, Martyn is. They give Phil a toddler’s book about a happy family hunting for bears (that Martyn might like), and a cheap plastic harmonica (that Martyn might like), and a bouncy ball (that Martyn might like), and Phil just stares at them with no expression once Martyn has voluntarily helped open them all, and then crawls off to a corner again to play quietly with other toys and ignore everybody. Kathryn wonders if her child will ever take any interest in anything beyond those two little soldier dolls he always carries around.

            It is on Martyn’s first day of school that Phil takes his first steps. In an almost practised way, he stands up, clutching the side of a table, and slowly toddles across the room in front of his parents. They clap and cheer and pick him up and cuddle him, and he doesn’t react. He is out of nappies soon after that; days after, in fact, during both the day and at night, and he goes from being archetypal baby to archetypal toddler in less than a week. Martyn comes home bubbling over with having learnt to count to a hundred and write A, B and C and spell his own name, and Phil slips under the radar whilst they tend to their other son. He doesn’t cry so much at night, now: when he wakes up, he just stares at the ceiling for hours until he goes back to sleep or until the sun rises. Sometimes they’ll find him in the mornings, already awake, silently playing with his dolls.

            One day Martyn comes home from school and tells Phil he’s got a sticker for reading, and then, in a sort of brotherly attempt at dominance, tells Phil he’s just a baby and won’t be able to read what Martyn can. It is when Martyn pulls out the book and sits down next to Phil with it and starts to read out loud that Phil says his fourth word. And his fifth word. And his sixth word. Because he is correcting Martyn. Having never taught their second child anything yet about the alphabet or phonetics, it is understandable that the fact their two-year-old can read is rather a shock to Nigel and Kathryn.

            They start taking him to doctors again. Apparently Phil is a prodigy, but he’s not anything out of the ordinary apart from that. (One doctor asks if the crying and the refusing to speak may be signs of past abuse and then gives the both of them hard, suspicious looks. They stop going to doctors after that.)

            When Phil turns three, he starts muttering. He locks himself in the downstairs toilet and they can hear him through the door talking to himself (though not what he says). He mutters to Holly, their house rabbit, and to Bundle, his grandparents’ dog. They never manage to get close enough to hear what he is saying, though various snatches of whispered song become familiar after a while. Phil has the curious habit of managing to pick up certain songs off the radio and sing them word for word after just hearing them once. This appears to be random: some songs he never remembers at all.

            Martyn picks up some of Phil’s songs and sings them around the house in snatches of remembered lyrics until Phil, in an uncharacteristic fit of childish rage, tackles his brother into a cupboard and yells at him to shut up until he stops. Despite this, Kathryn hums them around the house when the boys are elsewhere. She wonders sometimes where he got them from. Sometimes she wonders if he made them all up.

On Phil’s first day of school, his teacher asks to see Kathryn after lessons are finished, and tells her in a panic (whilst Martyn is told to start walking Phil home on his own) that Phil had completed all the worksheets for the year within the first half an hour of the lesson and then had sat in bored silence as the rest of the lesson had progressed, expression unchanging, until he’d been allowed to sit in the corner with all the books. She tells Kathryn that, at playtime, Phil had not said a word to anybody and had taken two little plastic figures out of his bookbag to act out a scene with without speaking. She suggests that Kathryn and her husband take Phil to see a doctor to check for autism, and that she would speak to the headteacher about moving Phil up a class despite that it wasn’t what they usually did.

They don’t take Phil to a doctor to check for autism. Instead, Kathryn brushes up on the Primary School curriculum and starts teaching Phil herself. They’ve decided no more doctors.

.

            _“Phil, what’s ten times ten?”_

_“One hundred.”_

_“What’s twenty times twenty?”_

_“Four hundred.”_

_“What’s fifty times fifty?”_

_“Two thousand five hundred.”_

_“What’s one hundred times one hundred?”_

_“Ten thousand.”_

_“Well done, Philip.”_

_Silence._

.

            Phil rarely takes his dolls out anymore. They just sit in his pocket. Sometimes it’s only one of the dolls. Always the same one.

.

            _“Phil, can I see that little man you’ve got there? What’s his name?”_

            _Silence._

.

            They don’t see him very much anymore, except for meals, and sometimes not even that. Dark corners have graduated to closed doors of bedrooms, and not even Martyn barges in on Phil now. Lessons with Kathryn in the mornings become homework assignments they discuss in one-sided conversation and single word answers over lunch and worksheets that Phil leaves completed on the dining table the next morning. Aged four and he is already drifting apart from the family, almost as though he were never a part of it at all. They don’t hold a fifth birthday party for him and he doesn’t ask for one.

.

            _“Yeah, Martyn’s brother’s creepy. I don’t really want to go round to his house in case… y’know… he’s_ there _…”_

_“Yeah, but didn’t he invite you to his party, though?”_

_“I’m not going.”_

_“I’m not going if you’re not going.”_

_“Well, I’m not going.”_

.

            Martyn’s birthday is quieter that year. Out of the twenty invited, only six turn up at the door. Phil stays in his room for the majority of it, not coming down until everyone has left, and even then just to help himself to something to eat. He never touches the sweet things unless he has to: Phil doesn’t eat for pleasure. Martyn never wishes his brother ‘goodnight’ that night but Phil doesn’t seem to notice.

            Kathryn wonders whether her second son is depressed: wonders whether or not she should ask him about it: wonders if he’d know what depression was before she asked him about it, like he does most things she says to him. She wonders if Nigel worries as much as she worries.

            Nigel ignores the fact his son wanders about like a ghost and has stopped expressing emotion even by crying; ignores the fact Martyn spends half his time being resentfully petty towards Phil and the other half being scared of him; ignores the fact his wife is torn apart by worry because, if he stops ignoring these things, he’ll fall apart.

            Phil still carries the dolls around.

.

            When Phil is six, they buy a home computer. Martyn loves it and commandeers it for hours at a time, playing the pre-installed games with a gleeful exuberance only matched in his high-speed bicycle races with friends. Nigel occasionally uses it for office work, preferring to use a type-writer (because Martyn’s constant asking to use it when he’s in the middle of work gets irritating). Kathryn doesn’t go near the thing, computers (she has decided) not being her idea of fun. Phil… becomes strange. He spends days being as much enamoured with it as Martyn; jealously hurrying through each game level at lightning speed and ignoring Martyn’s repeated pestering to go on it… and days shut in his room, refusing to come out, mostly (as Kathryn discovers by walking in on him one day) playing with his dolls. He draws sometimes. Large, boxy things in painstaking detail with flat black screens like televisions attached to computer keyboards. Animals; lions, bears, llamas, dogs, cats… House plans. Bedrooms. The last ones are the only pictures he colours in properly. Ironically, mostly in monochrome.

            When Kathryn tries to put them up on the fridge, somebody always finds them torn up and in the bin the next day. Eventually she just leaves him to it. (It feels like he’s waiting: always waiting, in the void he’s made of life.)

            Martyn starts secondary school, and Phil carries on completing worksheets to a lower and lower standard until sometimes he doesn’t even bother doing them or even taking them up to his room. Martyn makes lots of new friends and challenges them to races and computer game battles, and Phil stays locked up in his room. Martyn laughs hysterically at VHS tapes of Tom and Jerry; he gets upset when he crashes into a pole riding his bicycle and breaks one of the spokes; he shouts back when Kathryn nags, and hugs both her and Nigel in the evenings; he comes back home one day blushing and mumbling about some girl named Katie who’s apparently nice… pretty, even; he climbs trees, and he goes to the park to play tag with his friends, and he _loves_ strawberry ice-cream, and he groans and doesn’t want to get up in the mornings, and he avoids homework, and he talks about his day at the dinner table. Phil is seen in corridors sometimes getting food or visiting the bathroom or just _existing_. Phil can be heard sometimes walking around upstairs in his room. If you pull him in for a hug (stiff; wooden; unwanted) you can hear him breathing for a moment and you know that he’s alive. Somewhere inside he’s alive.

            The first time they buy a hamster Phil refuses to look at it.

.

            They don’t get to hear about how Phil is getting on at secondary school until they ask Martyn. “He blends in,” is all he can say. The teachers write down on his report card that he ‘could try harder’ and ‘should be referred to a psychiatrist’ and ask Martyn confidential questions about their home life which Martyn, bewildered, doesn’t know how to answer. Aside from this, it seems that Phil is as much a ghost at school as he is at home. He sometimes eats the lunch Kathryn packs and sometimes doesn’t. He sometimes does the work in lessons and sometimes doesn’t. He sometimes takes a little time to get ready in the mornings, the same as Martyn, and sometimes appears beside the front door, ready and neat and waiting, before anybody else is dressed and with shadows underneath his eyes. He still carries around the one little man in his pocket and brushes a thumb against it sometimes without a reason Kathryn can discern, but he doesn’t still play with it. Not anymore.

            They buy a new computer but Phil ignores it. Phil ignores everything.

.

            _Kathryn wonders when she will ever manage to stop comparing her sons._

.

            It is Phil’s twelfth birthday when he asks to see a doctor… or, more precisely, he hands Kathryn a psychiatry leaflet one of the teachers at school slipped into his homework in which one of the numbers is underlined. Kathryn stands up and hugs him; a hug he takes; a hug in which his arms, limp and slightly shaking, rise to curl loosely around her middle; a hug in which he leans into her and lets her kiss his hair and feel his uneven breathing against her neck (a hug in which he’s human to her again instead of the dead boy walking she had always thought he was). Nigel sets up the appointment the very next day.

.

            _Except it doesn’t go well. Except Phil walks out at the end of it wooden and unspeaking. Except Kathryn is given a prescription that tells her her son has schizophrenia or a split personality or sociopathy: something she looks up and then can’t recall because it’s wrong. Except her son doesn’t eat for several days because there’s no food gone from the kitchen. Except Kathryn walks one day into the bathroom to find one of the little men - the one he never carries around anymore – cut into bits and scattered over the rug. Except she cries and cries to Nigel at night about how one of their sons is dead and broken and she has no idea why and Nigel holds her._

.

            Martyn starts growing taller; broader; more confident. He goes out more with his friends (to avoid Phil, Kathryn thinks) and with girls (to avoid Phil, Kathryn thinks), and he laughs louder than he ever used to (without Phil, Kathryn thinks). He gives Phil his hand-me-down clothes, but Phil wears black these days; the colour of absence, and Martyn’s clothes are blues and greens and reds. With the white of his skin and the black of his clothes, Phil's hair is the only bit of him that’s not monochrome: red-brown and mousy though it is, and mostly hidden under hoods. Sometimes Kathryn thinks he's ill.

            Nigel tells her not to worry: that Phil’s fine. Tells her that she should stop comparing him to Martyn’s normality because this is _Phil_ not Martyn, and, anyway, all teenagers need time to grow into themselves. Kathryn nods and doesn’t listen. Nods and worries just as much. Nods and waits for something else to fall apart. Nods and waits.

            (One day Phil’s school calls her to tell her Phil is being bullied. Not that he seems to notice, they tell her, but the boys who were bullying him stole something that seems to be personal and it’s in the lost property office. When Kathryn goes to collect it, it is the other toy soldier.)

            For Phil’s fifteenth, Nigel gets him a bicycle. A new one, to match his height; just what Martyn had wanted at that age. It is bright red and has six gears and an LED light on the handlebars. Kathryn gets him a camera for taking photographs in the hope that he'd start taking interest in something; anything, even if it's not normally something teenagers like to do. Martyn gives him a five pound note because he’s forgotten to get anything for Phil, just as he always forgets. He then drops it onto the coffee table without an envelope, says he'll be out until late tonight, and leaves before Phil can appear, slamming the front door on his way out. Not that it matters. When Phil does appear, he looks at the presents with dull eyes and walks back up to his room. (A month later and the camera’s still on the coffee table and the bike’s still unridden in the shed, and the five pound note has been borrowed back by Martyn. A year later, and Kathryn has packed the camera away in a drawer: the same one in which she keeps the baby photos.)

            Phil finishes school without any GCSEs. He sits the exams, says his teachers, but he never picks up a pen.

.

            Martyn goes to University and Phil goes out. He goes out at night, seeming to sleep through the day as they never see him, and comes back after both Nigel and Kathryn have gone to bed. It’s not to parties. They don’t know where he goes. Nigel thinks it’s to get high; that that could be the only possible explanation for all this odd behaviour. Kathryn just doesn’t know.

            She asks him one day. “Phil, where do you go at night?” And he looks blankly at her and gives no response. He has dark circles under his eyes, these days, to match the dark colours of the rest of him. Sometimes she wonders if she even knows her son. Sometimes she wonders if he knows himself.

.

            It is the 28th March 2005 - she remembers it afterwards, the date, even though most wouldn’t single it out as anything special – when she hears Phil in his bedroom. She knows it must be Phil, even though she doesn’t recognise the voice, because he's singing one of the songs he used to whisper about the house.

            _“…the internet is here… the internet is great…”_

            It is clearer now, and she can make out all the words, no matter that they don't make sense: no matter that large pauses are left between some of them, and some verses are only sung in fragments, and the tune itself is fractured, the same way it might be played upon an instrument with notes missing. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter, because he's speaking and he's singing and, even if it's through a door; even if it's to himself, it sounds like it's for her.

            Later that day, she notices the family video camera is not in its proper place; that Phil has attached it to the computer, somehow, and is sat calmly at the monitor desk, head on hand, waiting for something. Kathryn thinks that, whatever it is, it is worth it to have heard her son singing.

.

            A week later and there is a boy on the doorstep. He has brown hair curling about his ears and tear tracks down his face, and Phil hugs him.

**Author's Note:**

> Marigold = Pain and Grief  
> Rosemary = Remembrance
> 
> Hope you liked it!  
> -Alibi


End file.
